Wright2006

Wright2006
BibType	INCOLLECTION
Key	Wright2007
Author(s)	Bonnie Wright, Anne Warfield Rawls
Title	Speaking in Tongues: A Dialectic of Faith and Practice
Editor(s)	Warren Goldstein
Tag(s)	EMCA, religion, Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) Church
Publisher	Brill
Year	2007
Language
City	Leiden
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages	249–284
URL
DOI
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title	Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice
Chapter

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Abstract

We report on a six year ethnographic/ethnomethodological study of the local order details of religious services at two Assemblies of God (Pentecostal) Churches in Detroit, a major metropolitan area in the American Mid-West. The research was designed to explore the relationship between local Interaction Orders of practices in details (Rawls 1987; Goffman 1983; Garfinkel 2002) and institutional orders of belief, narrative and account (Mills 1940; Durkheim 1912). The difference between an ethnomethodological and a more traditional ethnographic study is that ethnography aims for descriptions that illuminate the meanings, beliefs and values of actors and actions involved in the situations they study. Ethnomethodology, by contrast, focuses on those details that constitute the ways in which participants make their actions recognizable to one another as actions to which meaning, belief and value can be assigned in conventional ways. While beliefs are generally considered to be both the motivating and the organizing force behind religious behavior, we argue that local orders of religious practice are constitutive of beliefs – as they are of any meaning – and thus ultimately that practices are what give religion coherence and sustain shared belief.

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